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Found this while cleaning out my desk at home. Hmmmm ... 

Reminds me of the first managing editor I ever worked for, at the Prosser Record-Bulletin when I was in high school. When she interviewed me for the job (I started out cleaning floors) she said:

"If you're looking for fame or fortune, you're in the wrong place."

Wiser words hath never been spoken. But, it was a fun ride nonetheless.

Those electrified sheep in Wales

My brother sent me the link to this video. It purports to be about a bunch of artist types and shepherds who herd LED-draped sheep into patterns of exploding fireworks, the old Pong video game and even the Mona Lisa. Pretty funny and creative. Made me laugh and I sent it along to friends.

It was only at the end that I realized this was really a very clever Samsung ad. I wonder how many people watching it understood that? I'm guessing younger viewers got it right away while older viewers might have not realized it was an ad.

Viral videos like this are a great way for advertisers to sneak their message in under the critical radar of viewers. It's like product-placement on steroids. But it's a new level of disingenuousness that even TV ads (which are subject to laws governing their veracity) haven't approached.

I'm trying to decide what I think about it. On the one hand, it made me laugh and I loved it. On the other, I'm appalled at how blurry the line between advertising and the real world is getting. And that I almost fell for it.

I think.

While the sheep really were being herded, there was some computer trickery involved, said Matt Smith, co-founder of the ad agency that made the ad:

"The sheep herding bit is straight up – no trickery but there is a fair amount of computer trickery and post production work. We thought the Mona Lisa was the big wink to people – once they saw that we thought they would realise it was not all real."

Or, maybe not. It reminds me a bit of the New Yorker cartoon where a dog is sitting at a computer and telling another canine: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Or a phony bunch of shepherds.

Baaaahhh!

When they take it from our cold, dead hands

I was intrigued this week to see a young reader’s question to Richard L. Berke, the New York Times assistant managing editor for news. It was a variation on that ancient generational challenge: When will you old people get out of the way and let us younger folks run things? Berke’s response has generated a bit of controversy in the blogosphere.

The question from Josh of New Orleans related to the train-wreck that is the news business these days:

“Newspapering as we knew it — its economic sustainability and moral righteousness — died sometime in the last decade. Yet the people who sank the ship, namely those of the baby-boomer, Woodward-and-Bernstein era, are still at the helm, and giving up their lofty newsroom positions only with cold, dead hands. …

“My question is, both cheekily and seriously, when will your generation quit and let my generation try all these ideas we have about how the news should be presented?”

Berke’s response went something like this: It’s always been hard to land a news job, especially now. But, think of all the opportunities you have to innovate and try new forms of reporting:

“Maybe I'm refusing to face reality, but I believe that if you're enterprising and talented enough, there are more opportunities than ever in the world of journalism.”

That caused a harsh reaction on Jim Romenesko’s web site from some younger journalists. They complained that they have bills to pay (sometimes big bills), can’t afford the time to innovate, and that it was wrong to leave the people who ran the news biz up on the rocks at the tiller of the industry.

Good points, all.

I think I’d side with Berke, but for slightly different reasons. If you really want to fix what’s wrong with this business (and who doesn’t?), the last place you want to be is at a property owned by a big media company. Big companies are, by nature and with rare exception, conservative places. The people who are hired to run them aren’t hired to be daring or make cutting-edge moves. They are hired to be careful, preserve what has been built over many years, add to it some, and then pass it along to the next batch of managers.

That’s one reason why they missed what was coming with the web. They had a good and profitable thing going with print and it didn’t seem necessary, or prudent, to start tinkering with another delivery model that might endanger those profits. The big money was always in print and it always would be, wouldn’t it?

If you’re looking to innovate and find the new models, the best thing is to do it at smaller companies that are more nimble and willing to experiment and, possibly, fail. Jason Preston expressed it to me best many months ago: The big media companies need to act like startups, investing in people and ideas like a startup would: with an eye toward the future. And I’m not sure that they can or will.

I was struck while attending The Pitch, Jason’s media discussion event the other night, that there were few representatives of established media companies in attendance. And those who were there weren't the people making the big decisions. The topic was what business models might work for journalism for the next five years. Lots of good ideas were batted around and they were free for the taking. But, as far as I know, no one from a mainstream Seattle media company was there.

The people who were there were mostly academics and entrepreneurs (and a few folks from Microsoft). Those entrepreneurs are the fertile ground where these new ideas will be found and nourished. If the big media companies were smart, they’d spread a little money around to these folks and see what grows. Call it digital fertilizer. But, maybe that’s too far outside their comfort zone also.

Lots of new blogs, post-P-I

Several of my friends from the P-I are starting their own blogs now that the paper has closed. I'm starting a list on this blog so others can find them. Check the list of links at right. You'll find:

• Cecelia Goodnow's blog on children's books, Cover to Cover Kids.
  
• Rebekah Denn's food blog, Eat All About It.
  
• Leslie Kelly Whining and Dining
  
• Gene Stout's music blog
  

And there will be more to come as people get online. James Wallace, the P-I's superb aerospace reporter, is promising a blog. John Levesque, who held more jobs at the P-I than just about anyone (business editor to sports columnist) has a blog and I'll get the link to that as well [Note: Turns out John isn't blogging].

Check these folks out. They are the best at what they do and worth a look.

UPDATE: Rebekah Denn has a much more comprehensive list on her blog, Eat All About It.

P-I farewell video

This is the video I did for the end of the P-I print publication.

Morning after at the P-I

Went in to work this morning to do my exit interview. The final paper was published last night and the P-I is now a web-only news site.

There were a surprising number of people in the newsroom. Some were working on the web site, others were cleaning out their desks, which is one of the things I did. Computers are being removed from most of the desks.

Before I came in, I e-mailed KPLU and requested a song: Tony Bennett and Bill Evans' haunting version of "Some Other Time." The song is from "On the Town." The lyrics are by the incomparable Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the music is by Leonard Bernstein:

Some Other Time

Where has the time all gone to
Haven’t done half the things we want to
Oh well
We’ll catch up some other time

This day was just a token
Too many words are still unspoken
Oh well
We’ll catch up some other time

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting
But let’s be glad
For what we’ve had
And what’s to come

There’s so much more embracing
Still to be done but time is racing
Oh well
We’ll catch up some other time

Empty desks at the P-I

Sad to see how many desks are already sitting empty in the offices of the Seattle P-I, where I work. We expect to learn the final publication date any day now. Could be as soon as next week that the print product will cease to exist. Wish I wasn't taking these in our shop but that's the way things are going in the news biz.

The words of a song from World War II come to mind: "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

The next couple of weeks are going to be hard.

Sunset on Elliott Bay

Every once in a while the clouds do part on a Seattle winter and we get a stunning sunset. Yesterday evening was one of those times.

I'm going to miss a great many things after the P-I is gone, and this view from our offices is one of them.

The post-election New Yorker cover

The New Yorker is known for their arty covers, but every once in a while they produce something special. This week's issue, which I haven't received yet, is one such time. It's an elegant homage to the president-elect, Barack Obama. 

Perfect!

The president-elect: What comes to mind

Ever since the presidential election was called on Tuesday, I've been thinking of a piece of poetry by Seamus Heaney. The lines occur in "The Cure at Troy," Heaney's translation and adaptation of Sophocles' "Philoctetes," a play about the Trojan War, and they are much quoted (they're a favorite of Bill Clinton's): 

History says, Don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

This seems like one of those times. Truly an amazing moment, one filled with hope and possibility. Congratulations, President-elect Obama.

Planet Money

The current economic meltdown is scary and confusing. A good source for information and understandable explanations is NRP's Planet Money blog and podcast. 

Four of NPR's best reporters are asking good questions and explaining what's going on in uncomplicated terms. Last week, Planet Money broke the story that the Congressional bailout bill would allow the government to purchase stock in troubled banks ("stock injections" ... see what I've learned already?). That's a big deal because Republicans in the House made a big stink over just such a move last week.

How things have changed!

Planet Money also helped produce last week's excellent edition of This American Life: "Another Frightening Show About the Economy." If you're wondering what "credit default swaps" are, this is the primer you've been looking for. This episode is free right now but will cost you $.95 after Sunday, I believe.

One silver lining to this disaster is that we're all going to know a hell of a lot more about the economy and Wall Street than we ever thought we would.

God hates fangs

Stephen Moyer as vampire Bill Compton in "True Blood."

Photo courtesy HBO

Vampires don't usually do too much for me, but I have to admit that I've gotten a bit hooked on HBO's new series, "True Blood." It's funny, creepy and unsettling and it's set in the South, so it pretty much hits the grand slam of oddball horror and cracked behavior.

The show (by "Six Feet Under" creator Alan Ball) is based on a series of Southern vampire novels by Charlaine Harris. The premise: A Japanese company has developed synthetic blood that provides all the vampires' basic nutritional needs, allowing them to make themselves known and to ask for the same rights that humans have.

Ball said in a radio interview that he sold this to HBO as "popcorn TV," which it mostly is. There's some subtle comment on anti-vampire discrimination and religious intolerance that has parallels to anti-gay sentiment, but mostly it's just weird and fascinating and bloody.

The best part of the show is the opening credits (below). Newsweek notes that opening credits are sort of a dying art, but Ball uses them to great effect to open "True Blood" with a sense of doom. Shot on film at various speeds and printed with some colors overly saturated and others muted, the credits are like a Southern Gothic fever dream brought to life, gators and religious hysterics included. And on the soundtrack, Jace Everett growls, "I wanna do bad things to you." Oh, yeah!

Too bad they didn't borrow this look for the series itself:

Thomas Friedman is damned angry

And for once, I agree with him. 

Friedman was on Fresh Air the other night, talking about his new book, "Hot, Flat and Crowded." In the book, Friedman challenges the conventional wisdom that the best way to break our dependence on foreign oil is to "Drill, baby, drill!" What we need to do, he says, is break free of oil altogether by developing new, eco-friendly and sustainable energy technologies.

As Friedman notes, the three people grinning at the chants of "Drill, drill, drill!" at the Republican National Convention were the observers from Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. They want us to stay hooked up to the oil company. They make billions off of it. And alot of that money is funneled to terrorism and despotic regimes.

What brought down the Soviet Union? Friedman argues convincingly it was $80 a barrel oil, which caused the Soviets to over-extend themselves, followed by $10 a barrel oil, which ruined their economy. Iran, he says, is a country in a similarly precarious spot. It funnels billions in oil revenue to radical causes. Should oil prices drop again, Iran would be in trouble.

We had a shot at developing alternative energy technologies, but the Reagan Administration cut off subsidies in the 1980s. Now, all the technology we developed has moved to other countries and all we have left is our dependence on oil. Friedman says, if we would use government regulations to shape the economy to make it favorable to green energy, we could create technology that would lead the world.

Friedman says the notion of drilling our way out of our dependence on foreign oil is "crazy." He's angry that the opportunity to get free of foreign oil has been squandered and that we keep digging ourselves in deeper and deeper to the oil economy.

He's right. We should all be angry. Check out the Fresh Air interview.

The real story about oil

On the Media is one of the best shows on NPR (and you can listen to it on a podcast if you can't catch it on the radio). The show asks tough questions about the media and shows how we often get played for suckers by politicians and big business.

On last week's show David Fiderer, a writer for the Huffington Post and a banker in the energy industry for 20 years, was the subject of a segment. Fiderer is ticked that reporters are so easily taken in by the energy industry and that they lack a basic understanding of how it works. Will drilling offshore lower gas prices? Nope, says Fiderer. Nuclear power as a way to energy independence and lower gas prices? It won't make a difference at the pump, he says.

Bob Garfield, reporter for the segment, asks about the possibility of energy independence:

GARFIELD: Like given the way petroleum deposits are distributed on Earth, is it reasonable to imagine the U.S. being fully independent of foreign oil, ever?

FIDERER: Not if we consume oil at anything close to the rate we have for the last 50 years. If we consumed oil at the rate we did in 1965, we would still be importing 40 percent of our oil.

Reporters shouldn't let politicians and energy industry leaders control the debate, Fiderer says. Amen.

Check it out. You can listen to the segment here:

'Generation Kill:' The view from inside the Humvee

"Gentlemen, from now on we're going to have to earn our stories."

                                              -- Sgt. Brad "Iceman" Colbert, "Generation Kill"

The best movie of the summer isn't on the screens of your local multiplex, it's on HBO. And it ends this Sunday.

"Generation Kill" is a miniseries based on Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright's non-fiction account of his ride with a Marine reconnaissance patrol during the first 40 days of the Iraq war (produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the guys behind "The Wire"). It's funny, profane and scary. It's at its best when it captures the simple tedium of war as the Marines drive and wait and drive some more and wonder if they will ever see action.

When I've tried to describe the series to friends, I tell them that the thing it does best is to put you inside that Humvee with those Marines. You listen to them talk and boast and chatter endlessly. The radio spits out bulletins and orders. The Marines talk about their fears and frustrations. They stop to take a shit beside the road (no flush toilets for these guys). And, every once in a while, bullets slash through the night or an explosion rips the calm of a village.

When Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" came out, William Arnold, our film critic at the Seattle P-I, said that he thought it was a new way of presenting a war, that the film simply put you in the middle of of the battle and let you experience it as the soldiers did. "Generation Kill" owes much to Spielberg (the first 20 minutes of "Private Ryan," I think, may be the most significant contribution to film he has made). No John Wayne heroics or plot lines here, just guys trying to do their job and stay alive (and sane) in a very bad place.

The episodes start quietly and move through the mundane until the fight begins. Handheld cameras put you in the middle of the action. It's confusing, just as I imagine a real battlefield is. And sometimes, mistakes are made, just as on a real battlefield. At the end, you're shaken and confused and profoundly moved.

The director Sam Fuller once said that the best way to make a war movie would be to take shots at the audience every once in a while to make them feel what it's like to be in the middle of the real thing (but he admitted that might be bad for business). "Generation Kill" comes surprisingly close to doing that. In the end, the guys in the Humvee are heroes not because they are Rambo or super patriots, but because they simply survive this badly managed invasion, are there for their buddies, and come out with their dignity intact.

It's an amazing series and I'm sad to see it end. If you don't have HBO, look for it on DVD in a few months.

Elvis Mitchell's radio show, The Treatment, has a great interview with Susanna White, the Brit who directed the first three episodes and the last one. 

UPDATE: The last episode just finished airing. I may write more about it later. Among the many things that struck me, one was that, like another great anti-war film, "M*A*S*H," "Generation Kill" ends with a football game. But where Robert Altman played that scene for laughs, the game in "Generation Kill" becomes a reflection of the Marines' anger and frustration with the war and with each other. Fists fly and finally someone says, "Maybe we shouldn't play football anymore." Amen.

And then the episode ends with a video (some of it actually shot by Marines in Iraq) set to Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around." As Star-Ledger blogger Alan Sepinwall notes, it's almost a cliche but you have to give "Generation Kill" a pass because the song is such a perfect fit.

Stay frosty.

Warmth, Giant Black Toobs

Seattle artist Susan Robb installed her artwork, "Warmth, Giant Black Toobs," at Volunteer Park today. She uses 50-foot polypropylene tubes that heat in the sun until they become buoyant and float.

The effect is amazing and, at first, a little unnerving. The tubes seem to come alive, moving and bumping in to each other, rising on the heat of the sun and a light breeze. When the sun goes behind a cloud, the tubes lay down on the grass but continue to move, nuzzling each other and competing for space.

At times, they reminded me of giant strands of hair; at others, like the water creature from "The Abyss." In the end, they are really their own thing, changing the space they inhabit and making us stop and look at the familiar in a new way. Everyone who came by, especially kids, loved them.

I produced a video of the piece for seattlepi.com.

Fading flowers

Saw my buddy Kim Carney yesterday. She does such cool flower photography on her blog. She inspired me to take a walk today and see what's growing (or starting to fade) in the neighborhood. More photos on my Flickr feed.

100 years: David Lean and Bette Davis

David Lean on the set.

The centenaries of two of the giants of the movies -- David Lean and Bette Davis -- are being marked this month. Reflecting on the careers of both serves to remind us of how small the movies have gotten these days.

Anthony Lane's piece in the New Yorker, "Master and Commander," gives a good, quick overview of Lean's career. He started as a film editor, learning his craft on "quota quickies," films made quickly to satisfy British law requiring a certain amount of English-produced content be shown on the nation's movie screens. He also worked on newsreels, rapidly trimming film as it came in to the studio so it could be shown in theaters when events were still fresh.

In a sense, Lean remained a cutter all his professional career. As Lane says, Lean didn't believe in editing just to be flashy. A good cut had to move the story forward (case in point: his "Lawrence of Arabia" cut from Peter O'Toole blowing out a match to a red-orange scene of sunrise over the desert is one of the most famous in movie history ... and it serves to thrust you directly into the heart of the story).

Lean's name became synonymous, in later years, with the epic film. "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dr. Zhivago:" All were huge hits and took years to make. Then, tastes changed, Lean created a huge flop (his first box office dud) in "Ryan's Daughter" and didn't make another movie for 14 years ("A Passage to India").

In the end, the restoration of "Lawrence" also helped to restore his reputation as one of the great filmmakers.

Recommended: Just about anything he ever directed, including the epics mentioned above but also earlier, smaller films like "Brief Encounter."

In the New York Times today, Terrence Rafferty writes about Bette Davis. Davis is probably remembered by younger viewers for her later work (mock horror films like "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?") or her loud appearances on David Letterman.

But, in her prime, in the 1930s and '40s, she was a major star and a force both on-screen and off. She confronted studio bosses, demanding better parts and, for the most part won, setting a precedent that has benefited all actors, particularly women, to this day. In the 1950s, with her career on the wane, she pushed again and landed one of her greatest roles, as aging Broadway star Margot Channing in "All About Eve."

Rafferty writes about her role in "Eve" and also her starring role in "Jezebel." Davis, he says, was never afraid to take on a tough role that might not be popular with an audience. He notes that her power on screen was so great, and her skill as an actor so keen, that even when she wasn't in closeup, all eyes would be on her. And that she could convey her characters' moods even in a wide shot.

My favorite Davis entrance is the opening of "The Letter," one of three brilliant films she made with director William Wyler (the others are "Jezebel" and "The Little Foxes"). The sleepy evening at a Singapore rubber plantation is broken when Davis charges onto the veranda, following her lover and emptying a pistol into him. She stands over him, firing the gun until the bullets are gone and all you hear is the click of an empty chamber.

"All About Eve" is an acting tour de force, but so, in their way, are her earlier three-hanky weepers like "Dark Victory" and "Now, Voyager." Only Davis could take such potentially sentimental roles (a dying, spoiled rich girl in the first; an emotionally destroyed rich girl in the second) and make them believable. And sexy: No one ever looked better sharing a cigarette than Bette Davis did with Paul Henreid in "Now, Voyager."

Recommended: "Dark Victory," "Jezebel," "Now, Voyager," "All About Eve," "The Little Foxes" and "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

'Ace in the Hole'

One of Billy Wilder's greatest movies -- and one of his rare flops -- is on home video at last. "Ace in the Hole" is a tough, cynical noir tale about the news business. It stars Kirk Douglas as a success-at-any-price newspaperman.

The film was a box-office failure when first released in 1951 and has never been available on home video. A Criterion two-disk set in a beautiful DVD transfer was issued earlier this month.

Go buy or rent this and watch it. Yes, it's good. Yes, you'll love it.

We'll gather back here in a couple of days to discuss.

'Wonder Boys:' Making choices

Hannah Green: Grady, you know how in class you're always telling us that writers make choices?
Grady Tripp: Yeah.
Hannah Green: And even though your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's ... it's at times ... it's ... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And ... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices.

"Wonder Boys" (2000) is a movie about failing to make choices and, finally, growing up and making them. It's a funny, nuanced comedy, directed by Curtis Hanson of "L.A. Confidential" fame, with one of Michael Douglas' best performances ever. I watched it again last night and fell in love with it all over.

Based on Michael Chabon's novel, it's the story of a writer, Grady Tripp (played by Douglas), who is stuck writing his second novel. His first was a critical success and he's been working for seven years on his second. It's not that he's blocked (he doesn't believe in being blocked). It's that he can't stop. When he sits down to write, he rolls a blank sheet of paper into his typewriter and types a page number: 261. A pause, then he adds another 1 to make it 2611. As more than one person in the film notes, that's a lot of book.

Grady hasn't made any choices and now he's facing too many: his girlfriend (the chancellor of the university where he teaches, played by Frances McDormand) has announced she's pregnant (and she's also married to the head of the English department), his wife has left him and wants a divorce, his editor (Robert Downey Jr.) is in town and wants his book, and a prized student (James Leer, played by Tobey Maguire) wants his guidance (and can't seem to tell where life ends and his writing begins). And there's a matter of the chancellor's husband's dog, which Leer has shot when it attacked Tripp.

"Wonder Boys" is subtly funny and knowing of its subject: writers talking about, bragging about, complaining about and, occasionally, actually doing some writing. When Leer is carried out of a lecture, stoned and on the edge of vomiting, he narrates the whole event out loud ("They were going to the restroom. But would they make it in time?"). The university's WordFest event is a stinging send-up of pretentious literary confabs (Rip Torn stars as a wildly successful author who announces, at the start of his WordFest speech: "I ... am a writer.").

Michael Douglas gives what I think is the best performance of his career. He's unexpectedly funny and sad, shuffling around in a pink, chenile bathrobe, limping from a dog bite and taking the occasional hit off a joint. His life is a mess and, unlike a novel, there are no easy choices, no simple path to the final page. When his girlfriend asks what he wants to do about the baby, he hesitates. "I can't wait for you," she says. "I'm going to have to make this decision on my own."

Steve Kloves adapted Chabon's novel. He crafted a script that is funny and oddly moving. Tripp narrates the story, a device that is frowned on in modern films, but here it works, giving the film a writerly quality that is pretty much perfect. Such as this, after Torn and Downey roar off in Tripp's car:

So there it was. Somewhere in the night, a Manhattan book editor was prowling the streets of Pittsburgh; best-selling author at his side, dead dog in his trunk.

The ending is a touch too pat, but I was willing to forgive it because the rest of the movie is so great. Worth checking out.